


second skin

by picklebridge



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s02e06 The Tragedy, Gen, Light Angst, Mild Hurt/Comfort, The Mandalorian (TV) Season 2, The Mandalorian (TV) Spoilers, after the sarlacc pit, spoilers for s02e06: The Tragedy, the mandalorian creed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:22:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28037628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/picklebridge/pseuds/picklebridge
Summary: Neither of them can ever truly go back to the things that they were.-After the fight, Boba Fett reflects on what it means to have his armour back.
Relationships: Boba Fett & Jango Fett
Comments: 14
Kudos: 123





	second skin

**Author's Note:**

> not a character that i ever really envisioned writing for, but temuera morrison has my heart and i am LOVING boba being in this season. his fight scene? stunning. 10/10 would watch boba play golf with stormtrooper's heads again.

There’s no time, in the moment, to think about how it feels.

Just the split seconds it takes to snatch the armour from the Razor Crest’s bench and strap it to his body, long-lost shapes knitting back onto the scaffold of his flesh, even though his muscles have softened, his skin has scarred and his soul has weathered. He is an altered man, all these years and a few harsh lessons later. But in those seconds, and the long minutes-hours-days after, it almost feels like nothing has changed.

Of course, so many things have.

It is not until he is sitting in the cockpit, alone, the blinding light of hyperspace glinting off the dents in his armour, that he lets himself really feel it: how good it feels to have beskar against his body again. He savours the weight, the stretch and pull he feels when he shifts to change something on the console. The comforting cradle of the helmet against the back of his neck. His ever faithful second skin.

He’d forgotten what that was like. He’d forgotten the way you stand differently, the way it’s not just the metal, but what it means when you don’t have to worry about watching your back, because the armour is watching it for you. He’d forgotten the quiet sanctity of the helm, the slight hiss of the vocoder lapping at the fringe of his mind like waves on a shore. It’s a defect really, but to Boba it feels like home. Jango told him the story when he came back from a job, the armour still wet with Kamino’s rain. How someone had gotten the drop on him and jabbed a vibroblade into the seam of his neck, how he would leave that small flaw there as a reminder of his carelessness. Boba leaves it now because of that memory – because of the echo of his father he hears every time he speaks.

He hadn’t realised how afraid he was that he’d lost that sensation forever. Not until the helmet was back on his head and he could feel, as visceral as touch, the phantom weight of Jango’s hands on his shoulders, holding him steady.

For a moment, he can kid himself that he never took it off. That it was never taken _from_ him. That he never went through those desolate, humiliating years alone, the heat of the suns on his exposed neck and each grain of sand against his skin a constant reminder of his shame. But there’s the obvious, of course. The rends and dents pockmarking the beskar, scars and memories they didn’t make together. The scratched paint, the frayed strapping, the places where dirt has caked unforgivingly into the joints through the negligence of someone who hadn’t understood its care.

But t goes deeper, past the plates and the dirt, and these changes he finds harder to bear. The places where the under-armour has shifted to mould to someone else’s form. The point where the paint has worn off on the gauntlet in a thumb-shaped groove, a nervous tic against a pulse point that isn’t his. Most insidious of all is the way the smell of the helmet is wrong. It takes him a while to figure it out, but he realises it’s the padding on the back of the skull – the places where someone else has fought and sweated into the fabric, making his home their own. Desecrating the chain between Jaster, his father, and him. The skin they had all shared. The promise they had chosen to weave into their blood.

Neither of them can ever truly go back to the things that they were.

Boba knows this. Has known it since he smelled air thick with blaster fire, a different sun glinting off the dome of a fallen helmet as blood soaked into sand. Deserts have never been kind to him, but they have forged him too, and this time will be no different.

He smooths his hand over his gauntlet, welcoming the way the paint flakes under his palm. He will strip it when they land, but he will not bash out the dents. He will learn them instead, how each feels under his fingertips, and in time, the armour will relearn him too.

It is all he knows how to do: get up, push on, and forge a new path. With this armour on his back, he will always figure out the Way.


End file.
